A $600 Billion Increase for the Military is a Ton of Money
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| LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for PERMANENT ARMS ECONOMY |
I’m going back to harping on one of my favorite topics, because it is really necessary right now. The $1.5 trillion that Donald Trump is asking for the military for next year is a crazy amount of money. It should be laughed out of Congress, but due to Trump-cult member Republicans, and a professionally inept Democratic Party leadership, he might get something like this passed.
The first thing that we should be clear about is the size of the increase. The budget enacted for the military for fiscal year 2025 was $862 billion, a bit less than 2.9% of GDP. That’s roughly where spending had been since the winding down of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a decade ago. Trump’s budget would raise military spending to just under 5% of GDP, a level that we haven’t seen since the end of the Cold War.
This should have everyone screaming about why we suddenly need so much money for defense. After all, Trump is supposed to be buddies with Putin. And Russia’s GDP is less than one-quarter as large as ours in any case. Do we need to spend an amount equal to 20% of its GDP to defend ourselves from it?
China does have a much larger GDP than the U.S., but we had been largely friendly rivals. Perhaps Trump has changed that, but China had, until recently, been one of our largest trading partners. Our trade with China has fallen sharply, but if we are now enemies, we will end up spending tens of trillions in an arms race with an economy that is already more than a third larger than the U.S. economy and growing much more rapidly. We might look to go back to trading with China; it would be much cheaper.
Trump has also made other enemies in his 15 months in office, including most of our former allies. Perhaps he needs the money to defend us against France, Canada, and Denmark.
If Congress wants to at least pretend to earn its paycheck, it should demand some clear answers as to why Donald Trump thinks he has to spend 60% more defending the country than Obama, Biden, or he himself did in his first term.
The other point is that people should be pounding on reporters who don’t make clear how much money Trump is asking for his military buildup. NO ONE knows how much $600 billion is, and ALL the reporters who will just write down the number KNOW that no one can attach any meaning to it.
If reporters want to pretend to earn their paychecks, put the number in some damn context. It’s around 8% of the total budget; it comes to more than $4,500 per household.
It is 20 times as much as the annual cost of extending the enhanced Obamacare subsidies for 22 million people. It is more than a thousand times the appropriation for public broadcasting that Trump and the Republicans nixed last year.
And it is 2,400 times the size of the fraud in Minnesota that got Trump and his followers in a frenzy. The amount of fraud that has been identified in Minnesota is $250 million. The fraud involved some Black Somalis, so this is just Trump’s way of yelling, “Black immigrants, FRAUD!” (The scheme was organized by a white person, and the scam was uncovered and prosecuted under Biden.) We would like fraud to be zero, but in a government that spends over $7.5 trillion a year, some fraud is inevitable, just as is the case with large private corporations.
And to take one other measure that should get more attention, it is almost 60 times the $10 billion that Donald Trump is planning to steal from taxpayers with an absurd lawsuit against the I.R.S. The lawsuit claims Trump was harmed because a contractor leaked Trump’s tax returns, showing he paid very little in taxes in 2019 and 2020.
Ken Griffin, a hedge fund billionaire who also had his information leaked, had his lawsuit on this leak thrown out in 2024 because he couldn’t show any damages. But Griffin wasn’t a sitting president who could order the Treasury Department to turn over whatever money he asked for.
Reporters can pick other comparisons, but they can’t pretend they are doing serious reporting if they just write down Trump’s budget request without any context. Reporting is about conveying information. Writing down a huge number that is meaningless to everyone who sees it is a fraternity ritual, it’s not reporting.
Trump’s military budget request is tens or hundreds of times larger than the items that ordinarily are cause for major political debates in Washington. That is not a political statement, that’s a fact. People need to know it.
This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.
Pentagon Spending Spirals Out of Control
More details USS North Dakota, the first of the VPT-equipped Block III Virginia-class submarines. (Cost: $2.6 billion) Photo: U.S. Navy.
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies…a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 60 cities…two fine, fully equipped hospitals. This is not a way of life at all…. It is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
– President Dwight D. Eisenhower, April 16, 1956, “The Chance for Peace” delivered before the American Society of Newspaper Editors.)
“Enough of the idolatry of self and money! Enough of the display of power! Enough of War!”
– Pope Leo XIV, April 16, 2026
Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Jimmy Carter were graduates of U.S. military academies and, perhaps as a result, understood the limits and constraints on the use of force. They did not engage in the limited planning that led to Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs, Johnson’s Vietnam, Reagan’s Grenada, Bush II’s Iraq, Obama’s Afghanistan, and now Trump’s Iran.
With the exception of one fatality in Lebanon in 1958 and eight U.S. servicemen in the unsuccessful hostage rescue mission in Iran, no U.S. forces lost their lives in combat operations during Eisenhower and Carter’s three terms in office.
With the exception of Carter, Eisenhower’s successors ignored his warning about the “potential” for the “disastrous rise of misplaced power”—his reference to the need to control military influence over national security policy. The largest defense budget in U.S. history is further enhanced by the budgets of the Veterans Administration ($490 billion), intelligence ($115 billion), and the Department of Homeland Security ($118 billion). Even before this year’s increased spending, the United States devoted more to military spending than the rest of the world. The proposed increases in defense spending would add an astounding $7 trillion to the national debt over the next ten years.
Trump’s defense budget for 2027, which requests $1.5 trillion, demonstrates what Eisenhower’s warnings were all about. The proposed budget would make $73 billion in cuts to environmental, education and health research programs. The Department of Health and Human Services would lose $15 billion, primarily in federally funded medical research. Another $15 billion would be cut from combating climate change, eliminating funds that improve clean energy and reduce harmful emissions.
The cuts to non-defense spending amount to cuts of more than ten percent, requiring gutting and cutting a huge range of domestic programs that millions of Americans rely on every day. Trump’s budget fully eliminates HUD’s Community Development Block Grant program and its Fair Housing Initiatives program. The Food for Peace program will be gone along with the Job Corps. NIH funding will lose $5 billion; FEMA $1.3 billion; humanitarian assistance $2 billion; NASA science and research programs $3.4 billion. The Environmental Protections Agency, which is alreadybeing trashed under its director, Lee Zeldin, will lose more than half of its budget; the Department of State, which barely exists, will lose more than 30% of its budget; HHS will lose over $100 billion or more than 10% of its budget.
Russell Vought, the budget director, stressed that the goal for spending was driven by ensuring that the United States “continues to maintain the world’s most powerful and capable military, and described the domestic cuts as targeting wasteful or “woke” spending in order to “achieve real savings.” We should be debating why the U.S. must be so powerful, particularly in view of its unequaled power projection capabilities the world over and its unequaled geographic security due to friendly borders and the protection afforded by two oceans. The goal of military supremacy must be reexamined. Instead, there seems to be widespread acceptance of the need to spend ever more money on an already huge military establishment.
The mainstream media, particularly the Washington Post, emphatically supports the wasteful increases for defense. In January, a Post editorial called the 50% increase a “bargain,” and argued that the “nation cannot afford” more “non-defense spending.” Last week, a Post editorial argued that the United States has the “technical prowess and financial ability to maintain its military preparedness around the world. It would be a shame if the country simply chose not to do it.
The mainstream media make no attempt to justify the deployment of U.S. troops in more than 150 countries, the counter-terrorism operations in nearly half of the world’s nations, or the 700 military facilities the United States maintains around the world. At the same time, the media exaggerate the threat of so-called “strongmen” such as Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong Un, who are not threats—let alone existential threats—to the United States or to U.S. allies such as Japan and South Korea in the Indo-Pacific or to NATO countries in Europe. The United States with its armed dominance, has caused more turmoil over the past 50 years than the actions of the so-called strongmen.
But there is one strongman to worry about—the one here at home. Defense spending will not help us with a president who is trying to establish absolute authority over all federal government agencies and to weaken the institutions of higher education, the media, and the law. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court has given far too much support to the excesses of the Trump presidency.
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